For Three Months, All I Wanted Was Hard-Boiled Eggs

Written by Marcia Cripe, RN

I don't particularly like hard-boiled eggs, which is probably the most important thing to know about this story.

Before I started tirzepatide, I would eat one occasionally, but they weren't something I sought out or thought about. Then, for somewhere around three or four months after starting the medication, hard-boiled eggs became one of the few foods I consistently wanted to eat. There were days when I ate four or more of them.

It wasn't eggs in general. I wasn't suddenly making omelets or craving scrambled eggs for breakfast. It was specifically hard-boiled eggs, a food I had never cared much about before.

Then, almost as strangely as the preference appeared, it disappeared.

I didn't decide I had eaten too many. I didn't consciously cut back or replace them with another food. I just stopped wanting them, and hard-boiled eggs went back to being what they had been before: something I could eat but didn't particularly care about.

I still don't know why it happened.

That's actually the reason I want to document it.

This Was Happening While My Entire Relationship With Food Was Changing

I started tirzepatide on May 10, 2024, and within the first couple of months my relationship with food had changed in a way I had never experienced before.

At around 5 mg, my drive to eat could become almost completely absent. I wasn't simply making better food choices or finding it easier to resist something I wanted. There were times when I genuinely didn't care about food. Even deciding what to eat could become difficult because very little sounded appealing.

That distinction is important to the egg story because the hard-boiled eggs weren't competing against a long list of other foods I wanted. They stood out during a period when I often didn't want much of anything.

Restaurant food had become less interesting. Foods I had previously enjoyed didn't necessarily sound good anymore. Sometimes eating felt more like something I knew I needed to do than something I was motivated to do.

Yet somehow, a hard-boiled egg usually sounded fine.

When I couldn't think of anything I wanted, I could imagine eating one. When other foods felt too heavy or simply uninteresting, the egg still seemed manageable. Sometimes I would eat one and then another, and on some days I ate at least four.

For someone who hadn't particularly liked them before, it was noticeable enough that I remember it clearly more than two years later.

I'm Not Sure “Craving” Is Even the Right Word

I've gone back and forth on whether I would describe what happened as a craving, and I don't think that's quite right.

When I think of craving something, I think of a food getting stuck in your head. You really want it, you think about getting it, and maybe you'll even go out of your way to have it. That's not exactly how I remember the eggs.

They simply sounded right when most other foods didn't.

That may sound like a small distinction, but living through major appetite suppression made me realize there are a lot of different experiences that we casually bundle together as *appetite*. Being physically hungry isn't necessarily the same as wanting a particular food. Knowing you enjoy a food isn't necessarily the same as being motivated to eat it. Thinking something tastes good once it's in your mouth isn't necessarily the same as wanting more of it.

At the time, I wasn't analyzing any of that. I certainly wasn't thinking in terms of hunger, appetite, food noise, reward, liking and wanting. I just knew I had very little interest in food generally and a weirdly persistent interest in one food I had never cared about before.

Looking back, that's what makes the experience interesting to me now.

I Wasn't Eating Them Because Someone Told Me I Needed Protein

There is an easy explanation I could attach to this story now.

I was losing weight rapidly and eating very little. Protein is important during significant weight loss. Eggs contain protein. Therefore, my body must have been telling me that it needed protein.

Maybe.

But I don't know that, and it isn't how I remember making the decision to eat them.

Dan did talk to me about protein during my weight loss, and over time I became much more deliberate about making sure there was protein in my meals. Looking back, I wish I had taken adequate nutrition and preserving muscle even more seriously than I did.

The hard-boiled eggs were different, though. I wasn't standing in the kitchen calculating how much protein I had eaten that day and choosing eggs because they helped me reach a target. I actually wanted to eat them.

That matters because it would be very easy, with the benefit of hindsight, to turn this into a neat story about my body recognizing a nutritional need and directing me toward exactly what it required.

It's a satisfying explanation.

I just don't have any evidence that it's the correct one.

I Can Think of Plenty of Possible Explanations

The problem with knowing enough physiology to generate explanations is that you can almost always come up with one that sounds convincing.

Maybe the eggs appealed to me because they were a simple source of protein during a period when I wasn't eating much. Maybe their combination of protein and fat made them particularly satisfying. Maybe they were easy for me to tolerate when other foods weren't. Maybe texture, smell or convenience played a role.

It's also possible that the way I experienced food reward or food preference had changed. That possibility is especially interesting to me now because changes in wanting food became such a noticeable part of my GLP-1 experience.

Or maybe we're trying to make something meaningful out of a random temporary food preference.

That's possible too.

The point isn't that none of these explanations could be right. Several are plausible. The point is that plausible isn't the same thing as demonstrated, and I don't have enough information to tell you which explanation, if any, accounts for what happened.

What I can say confidently is much narrower: I developed an unusual preference for hard-boiled eggs after starting tirzepatide, and that preference lasted for several months.

Anything beyond that is interpretation.

The Strangest Part Was How It Ended

If I had deliberately started eating eggs every day because they were convenient, I wouldn't find it particularly interesting that I eventually got tired of them. Eat almost anything often enough and eventually you may want something else.

That's not how I remember this ending.

There wasn't a conscious moment when I decided I had overdone it. I don't remember gradually reducing the number of eggs I ate or replacing them with some new favorite food. The preference simply seemed to disappear.

One day, hard-boiled eggs were no longer the food that reliably sounded good.

They were just eggs again.

That abrupt change is probably one reason the whole thing stayed in my memory. Something that had been unusually consistent for several months suddenly wasn't there anymore, and I never understood what had started it or what made it stop.

It Made Me Think Differently About What It Means to “Want” Food

The eggs themselves aren't really the most interesting part of this story anymore.

What interests me is what the experience revealed about my relationship with food.

Before GLP-1s, I don't think I had much reason to separate physical hunger from appetite, cravings, food noise, preference or reward. Those things usually traveled together closely enough that I experienced them as one general desire to eat.

Tirzepatide pulled some of those experiences apart.

I could be physically capable of eating without feeling hungry. I could know that I liked a food without having any desire to get it. I could eat something and recognize that it tasted good without wanting much more of it. Restaurant food could still be restaurant food and somehow lose most of its appeal.

And apparently, during a period when most food had become unusually easy for me to ignore, one very specific food could move in the opposite direction.

I don't know what that means biologically.

But it helped create a question that has followed me ever since: when someone says a GLP-1 “changed my appetite,” what exactly changed?

That's a question worth investigating scientifically.

This article isn't where I'm going to try to answer it.

I'm Writing This Down Before I Know the Answer

There's another reason I want this story published exactly as I remember it now.

Once we learn an explanation for something, it's very easy to reorganize our memories around that explanation.

Suppose research eventually gives us a much clearer understanding of how GLP-1 medications affect food preference, reward or the desire for particular foods. If that happens, I don't want to look backward and unconsciously clean up this story so that it fits whatever mechanism researchers have discovered.

I want the original observation preserved first.

So this is the flag I'm planting.

I started tirzepatide on May 10, 2024. During the period when my appetite and relationship with food were changing dramatically, I developed an unusually strong preference for hard-boiled eggs despite never particularly liking them before. The preference lasted somewhere around three or four months. There were days when I ate at least four eggs. I wasn't choosing them simply because I had decided to increase my protein intake, and I remember the preference disappearing surprisingly abruptly.

I don't know why it happened.

It may have had something to do with appetite or food preference. Nutrition may have played a role. Convenience or tolerability may have mattered. Several things could have been happening at once. It's also possible that the timing with tirzepatide was coincidental.

I don't need to choose among those possibilities to tell the story accurately.

Sometimes the Observation Is Enough

One of the things I want Two Nurses, One Journey to preserve is the difference between experiencing something and explaining it.

Our experiences can give us questions worth asking. Sometimes we'll take those questions into the evidence side of GLP-1 Logic and discover that researchers have already studied them. Sometimes the science will give us a strong explanation. Sometimes we'll find several competing possibilities, and sometimes we'll discover that nobody really knows yet.

But I don't want knowing how to research something to make us feel obligated to manufacture an answer when one doesn't exist.

This happened to me.

I noticed it because it was unusual enough to be memorable, and I'm documenting it because I don't know whether it will seem more meaningful, less meaningful or

For three or four months, when most food had become strangely easy for me to ignore, hard-boiled eggs were the exception.

Then they weren't.

I still don't know why.

For now, I just want it on the record.

Continue the Journey

The eggs were the strangest example, but they weren't the only food that changed for me.

As I lost weight on tirzepatide, foods I had loved for years started losing their appeal. Some still tasted perfectly fine when I ate them. I just didn't particularly want them anymore.

Continue reading: Foods I Loved Before Tirzepatide That I Barely Wanted Anymore

Sources

This article is a first-person Journey account based on Marcia Cripe's recollection of her life and experiences before beginning tirzepatide on May 10, 2024. It does not make clinical claims about tirzepatide or establish that the medication caused subsequent changes.